Literature Review Wrong Turn in America's Counterinsurgency

Colonel Gian Gentile is a retired U.S. Army seasoned combat battalion commander. He served in the Iraq War. Has taught history for the United States Military Academy at West Point. Presently, acts as senior historian for the Rand Corporation in his book Wrong Turn: America’s Deadly Embrace of Counterinsurgency questioned, “The necessity and efficacy of the doctrine of counterinsurgency (COIN) which is essentially armed nation-building.”

Gentile a trained historian with an eye for detail draws upon our Nation’s foreign interventions in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan in hopes of gaining additional insight into where we have been and where we are going with the strategy of waging counterinsurgency. In addition, Gentile pulls from narratives from the Malaya Emergency that took place from 1948-1960 as the British Empire was beginning to wane and needed to withdraw from the colonial possessions.

The British defeated the Malayan Communist insurgents after twelve years of fighting, but Gentile debates how the victory was won. In fact, he has reservations of whether British doctrine “Hearts and Minds” then modern counterinsurgency strategy had any bearing on the success of the British campaign. Gentile postulates the tactic of search and destroy framework along with the shift in the insurgent’s strategy is what altered the armed rebellion. Gentile argues the large-unit sweeps had major significance in fragmenting the insurgents into smaller bands therefore, disrupting the insurgents secure bases like those of Mao amassed in China. In interesting field research conducted by Sociologist Lucien Pye of the Communist insurgents from 1952 to 1953 she concurred with this analysis that large sweeps of search and destroy did disrupt the ins...

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...ve anything to do with the American Surge lead by General Petraeus.

This brings us to the discussion of Gentiles views on Afghanistan. Gentile has misgivings the effectiveness of counterinsurgency and taunts, “That American counterinsurgency has not worked and is nation building at the barrel of a gun.” Furthermore, “American strategy has failed in Afghanistan because it has become trapped by the promise that counterinsurgency can work if only it is given enough time and tactical tweaking” Gentile states besides, “There was a better strategy in Afghanistan available to American political and military leaders from the start.” This brings us to the works that Gentile refers to by Austin Long’s, “Small Is Beautiful: The Counterterrorism Option in Afghanistan,” the core policy of destroying al Qaeda could have been handled by much smaller special operation teams.”